weathering anti-cyclones, and I drove forward like a sinking steamer in a heavy sea. And this was what it was, in serious earnest, to be an author! For I reckon that in writing the first chapter of my naturalistic novel, I formally became an author; I had undergone a certain apprenticeship. I didn't feel like an author, no more than I had felt like a journalist on a similar occasion. Indeed, far less: I felt like a fool, an incompetent ass. I seemed to have an idea that there was no such thing as literature, that literature was a mirage, or an effect of hypnotism, or a concerted fraud. After all, I thought, what in the name of common sense is the use of telling this silly ordinary story of everyday life? Where is the point? What _is_ art, anyway, and all this chatter about truth to life, and all this rigmarole of canons? I finished the chapter that night, hurriedly, perfunctorily, and only because I had sworn to finish it. Then, in obedience to an instinct which all Grub Street has felt, I picked out the correct "Yellow Book" from a shelf and read my beautiful story again. That enheartened me a little, restored my faith in the existence of art, and suggested the comfortable belief that things were not perhaps as bad as they seemed. "Well, how's the novel getting on?" my friend the wall-paper enthusiast inquired jovially at supper. "Oh, fine!" I said. "It's going to be immense." Why one should utter these frightful and senseless lies, I cannot guess. I might just as well have spoken the precise truth to him, for his was a soul designed by providence for the encouragement of others. Still, having made that remark, I added in my private ear that either the novel must be immense or I must perish in the attempt to make it so. In six months I had written only about thirty thousand words, and I felt the sort of elation that probably succeeds six months on a treadmill. But one evening, in the midst of a chapter, a sudden and mysterious satisfaction began to warm my inmost being. I knew that chapter was good and going to be good. I experienced happiness in the very act of work. Emotion and technique were reconciled. It was as if I had surprisingly come upon the chart with the blood-red cross showing where the Spanish treasure was buried. I dropped my pen, and went out for a walk, and decided to give the book an entirely fresh start. I carefully read through all that I had written. It was bad, but viewed in the mass it produced on me a sort of culminating effect which I had not anticipated. Conceive the poor Usual at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and the region of the Sublime at the top: it seemed to me that I had dragged the haggard thing halfway up, and that it lay there, inert but safe, awaiting my second effort. The next night I braced myself to this second effort, and I thought that I succeeded.